


sweetness and depth

by mintpearlvoice



Category: L'Homme qui rit | The Man Who Laughs - Victor Hugo, The Grinning Man - Philips & Teitler/Grose & Morris & Philips & Teitler/Grose
Genre: Domestic Fluff, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Nightmares, musical dea would eat book dea for breakfast, the ending of the original book is just a bad dream
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-04
Updated: 2020-07-04
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:54:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25062703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mintpearlvoice/pseuds/mintpearlvoice
Summary: All the wealth in the world can't chase away fear, but love can.Or: Gwyn and Dea get to be happy.
Relationships: Grinpayne | Gwynplaine Trelaw/Dea
Comments: 8
Kudos: 33





	sweetness and depth

Dea Trelaw, she keeps whispering to herself. Lady Dea Trelaw!

There are so many lovely things to touch here. There’s a whole piano, its keys as glossy as polished stone, and it needed only a little tuning to restore its melody before she could manage some simple tunes by ear. Silk is like fresh water from the pump in summer, rippling slippery over her hands. Velvet is like the fur of a well-fed cat. And roses from the garden- the public gardens for the people of the city, now- they can be like nothing else but roses. She has never known anything like roses before.

Mealtimes take ages because finishing the food means she has to stop tasting it. Dinners so hearty she might weep. Tea with honey in it every morning. She could, if she wanted to, eat an entire stick of butter.

The best part- no, one of the best parts- is that she has learned how to read. Of course, no power in the world could restore the sight that she was born without. Something to do with how her skin is so pale, and her hair the color of snowdrops. There are others like her. Another best part.

There is a man in France who’s invented a system of raised writing, dots embossed onto the pages. She can tell herself stories. Ones she hasn’t heard yet. Right now she’s reading Dracula; dripping in blood, redolent with suspense, lovely and lush with agony. Jonathan has seen things no one ought to see, and Lucy is about to perish in spite of everyone who adores her. She’s so excited to find out who else will die.

“Good-night, Dea,” Gwyn had said a few hours ago. “Tell me how it ends in the morning... maybe put your bookmark in before dawn.”

She’d kissed his curls and teased him back. Now tiredness is weighing on her like a quilt, and she ought to be asleep, ought to sleep.

The man lying unconscious beside her flinches.

Dea’s fingers freeze on the page.

Perhaps it’s just a twitch, a bit of movement in his dreams, something meaningless. But then his breathing quickens, and then an unvoiced noise at the edge of hearing, and then another. And then a long, low moan, guttural with suffering, like an animal caught in a trap. 

At once she’s tucked the bookmark between pages and set her reading aside. Gwyn shudders all over.

Dea warms his hands in her own, and then strokes the tense whipcord muscles of his arms, presses her ear to his chest where the heart beats tremulously, desperately, like a butterfly trapped.

“Gwynplaine,” she murmurs, shaking him. “Gwyn-“

Gasping, he startles awake.

“I dreamed of being trapped,” he says in tones of blank horror, like one from whom confession has been tortured, and trembles fitfully, convulsively, in Dea’s arms. “Under the water, which seemed impossible to stir my limbs to escape- underground, clapped in irons- a palace- a labyrinth of mirrors and emeralds- stones upon stones piled upon my chest- the horrors I have seen, Dea. What I have witnessed. Yet I am brim-full with gratitude that you could be spared these sights, even a fraction of these sights- my father- the night itself where his eyes should have been, where the crows tormented his corpse- a man with the skin flayed from his back-“ this time it’s not a shudder but a shiver, a drawn-out one that sets his teeth chattering uncontrollably with remembered cold. She smells not just sweat, but blood. The thin, rigid coating of scabs where his lips would be have cracked again; they bleed sluggishly.

Dea holds him, rocking back and forth, and tugs the puffy quilt over them both as far as it will go. She kisses the smooth plain of his forehead and the fiercely untidy thatch of his hair and his cheeks where tears’ dampness has trailed down them.

“I dreamed they told us we would both be happier dead.” This time his voice holds nothing but brokenness, like a death-knell tolling. His weariness is fathoms deep. “That in Heaven you would have eyes that radiated sight, and I would have the beauty of an unharmed man. So it wouldn’t matter if they killed us, for that was the best- the best possible thing- I wouldn’t have minded whatever they did to me, but you couldn’t bear it, and I had to- to watch you die-“

All she can do is hold him and listen to the crashing waves of his tempest-tossed breathing, the ragged edges of his sob. As if she holds the world’s wildness, Tam Lin contorting through transformations, a snake, a bear, winter itself, the heart of a hailstorm with its icy stones hurled down from the thrashing sky.

Let him roar. She will be as sturdy as the cliffs of Dover, as steadfast as the dawn. Her breath itself says “I am here.”

His wails ebb into crying, into a shaky paroxysm of choked-off, strangled gasps.

She strokes his chest as if teaching him how to breathe. Imagining that her touch can guide air through his lungs. As if he is a shipwreck and she can dredge him up from the ocean’s floor.

“Gwyn, my own love, half my soul. I shall never leave you, even death could not part us... you won’t suffer. I forbid it. No more weeping, no more nightmares, I have you, I’m here.”

At last he sags into limpness in her arms; except for the rise and fall of his breathing, he lies still as a puppet between shows.

Perhaps she cannot clamber into his nightmares and cut them loose. But there are deeds she can manage. “Right. We’re changing your bandages.”

She feels him chuckle rather than hearing it. “Yes, Dea. Are you going to prod me and tell me how cross you’ll be if I pick at my scabs, the way you did when I was but a boy?”

“I don’t know. Do you plan on picking at them?” At least he’s feeling lucid enough to tease her now.

The routine is as familiar to her as how she lays out her props so she can find them during the show, or how she’ll pace a stage until she can manage to not fall off the edge without her cane. (People tend to think blindness is a matter of everything or nothing, but she can tell the difference between sunlight and shadow, and generally find the edges of things. Stairs, though? Potholes in the road? The way the sun glares on running water or fresh snow? At that point, what vision she does have slinks away in defeat.) Clean hands, clean gauze, smearing a honey salve over the ragged edges where lips once were, and tying the bandage behind his head.

“There,” she murmurs, tangling her fingers in his hair. “Better?”

“Mmm-hmm. Only- promise you’ll stay.”

“Always,” she says, in between kissing his forehead and his cheeks all over, and “if death came for me even if he was awfully superior and portentous about it, even if he offered to tell me the entire history of dying, I would bite him. You’re not the only one who’s got teeth, you know. Mojo’s taught me how to bite.” And, softer still: “I entreat you, I conjure you, I supplicate you, I who adore you; there is nothing to be frightened of, go back to sleep.”

This is what she likes best. Not piano keys or silk or velvet or the petals of roses. Just Gwyn close to her in the night. The weight of him, the unvoiced huff of his breathing, the many textures of his skin. May he dream of nothing but us, she prays. Nothing but this.

**Author's Note:**

> i did an absolutely disproportionate amount of research on albinism & wound care for this   
> (basically it's likely that dea would have extremely blurry vision and light sensitivity, but still be able to distinguish some colors and shapes)  
> (the only reason for a wound to still be bleeding after twenty years is, lbr, aesthetic)
> 
> title from a victor hugo quote: "Sweetness and depth, they are the whole of woman; in them lies the whole of heaven."


End file.
